guessed the intoxication of the air which a Roger de Beauvoir delicately breathed, when Paris, her spirit newly quickened with the exhilaration of a potent elixir, was yet unspoiled by modern cosmopolitan vulgarity, and her inner soul shone out, through all her deformities and incongruities, with a gay and unmasked confidence. She did not shine before an unseeing generation, for the Parisians of the Romantic age adored their city, dandies, Bohemians, and _bourgeois_ alike, all passionately conscious of their privileged citizenship, though they could admit with Maxime du Camp that under Louis Philippe she was "one of the dirtiest, the most tortuous, and the most unhealthy" in the world. As they lived in her, so they wrote of her--with pride. Victor Hugo did her great homage in "Notre Dame de Paris" and "Les Misérables," Eugène Sue in "Les Mystères de Paris," and Paul de Kock in all his work, but these achievements appear as slight and partial sketches beside the wonderful and penetrating picture which Balzac drew of Paris--at once the background and the protagonist--in his greatest novels. Balzac, besides giving us a world, gave us a great city. Minute as were the studies he made of the provinces, they are nothing to the picture that he drew of the city which he regarded as the brain of the whole world, the leader of its civilization. He gloated over Paris as a scientist gloats over an interesting organism that he has first observed and then skilfully dissected. He had dissected Paris even on the threshold of his career. In some of his early stories, like a brilliant young surgeon fresh from his researches, he overweights the matter in hand with the results of the laboratory. "Ferragus" begins with a long comparison of the streets of Paris; "La Fille aux Yeux d'Or" with a marvellous tirade on the restless race for money and pleasure that is run by all classes, a tirade which, probing as it does all the strata of society, is an epitome, in some sort, of all his work. Paris, that small _enceinte_ which was enclosed within what is now the second line of _boulevards_, still innocent of the reforming hand of Haussmann, becoming rich, but hardly yet industrial, not yet the pleasure-ground of all the world, destitute of railways, squalid, ill-kept, nevertheless was transformed by his wonderful imagination into the type of all great cities, which will ever remain true. To him she was "le plus délicieux des monstres," as he says in "Ferragus." "Mais, ô Paris," he cries, "qui n'a pas admiré tes sombres paysages, tes échappées de lumière, tes culs-de-sac profonds et silencieux; qui n'a pas entendu tes murmures, entre minuit et deux heures du matin, ne connaît encore rien de ta vraie poésie, ni de tes bizarres et larges contrastes. Il est un petit nombre de gens ... qui dégustent leur Paris.... Pour ceux-là Paris est triste ou gai, laid ou beau, vivant ou mort; pour eux Paris est une créature;